Only Available in the USA

So YouTube now supports video downloading, but only if you're browsing in the United States. A bit of a bugger, since I want to get some of the Google I/O 2009 talks onto my iPhone.

But all is not lost. I ran into this problem last year when NBC wouldn't send the latest episodes of Heroes over to Blighty. Here, in brief is the recipe:

You will need

1 cup SSH.
1 US-based server/mixing bowl.
1 Firefox.

Instructions

$ ssh -D 9999 me@myusaserver

Firefox Preferences->Advanced->Network->Settings
* Manual proxy configuration
* SOCKS Host: localhost Port: 9999

Now the world will think you're browsing from the US.

Other recipes you may like to try

Getting through to iPlayer from outside the UK, using a UK-based server.

This is a very handy trick, indeed.

It also helps accessing sites such as Flickr, if you were in a country (say, The UAE) who prevent access on the grounds that it’s pornographic.

In fact, if you are logging IP addresses, you’ll see that I am actually in my living room right now.

Submitted by Ann Onymous (not verified) on Wed, 2009-06-17 19:31.

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